How Do Newspapers Fit With Other Source Types?

Newspaper articles are often short (though not always!) and, in general, they do not go through an extensive peer review process. Therefore when you are making a distinction between “popular” and “scholarly” (also called “peer-reviewed'') sources for your research, newspapers should be considered popular.

You can learn much more about popular and scholarly sources using this tutorial. For a more basic overview, see the chart below. Remember, newspapers fall on the “popular” side!

Machine Readable PDF of Scholarly and Popular Comparison Infographic

Here’s a more specific breakdown of why newspapers qualify as “popular” sources. The New York Times is used as an example.

The New York Times is considered a popular source. Though the articles are often well-researched and intellectual in nature, the review process for this paper is very short. This is because the New York Times publishes at least once a day (sometimes more often, depending on the city!). Formal citations are not given; usually reporters will mention in passing where they got their information. This has more to do with formatting and journalistic conventions than the quality of research being done.

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